


extending into shooting stars

by lyin



Series: sabacc [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Divergence - Star Wars Expanded Universe, F/M, Gen, Slow Burn, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-22 20:53:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9624935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyin/pseuds/lyin
Summary: Rogue One, slightly shuffled.





	1. heroine pretend

**Author's Note:**

> A Butterfly Effect AU... that is also the EU (aka the Legends Verse, aka Ye Olde EU). The EU!AU.
> 
> The bones of the story stay the same - but changed, enough, that not everyone who steals the Death Star plans dies sending them. 
> 
> (I pictured/started this as a oneshot. It's...not a oneshot...)
> 
> So: Rogue One, jammed into the Legends!version of events... or, from a certain point of view, a cherry-picking from the absurd flurry of multiple EU variations of stealing the Death Star plans, slimmed down and slipped into Rogue One's beautifully clean arc. 
> 
> This is all to blame on the Easter Egg details of Cassian and Jyn's alternate identities being [“Aach”](http://thegirlwholied.tumblr.com/post/155319529548/if-youre-wondering-why-one-of-cassians-aliases) and ["Kestrel Dawn"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G91_pYVtPSU), which sneakily slides them in the Ye Olde Star Wars EU of my childhood all along.

The past refuses to be buried. It is alive, in Jyn Erso’s dreams, always true if not always in order. She breathes in the smoke and ashes seeping through the hatch in the cave, refusing to cough and make a sound as she waits. She breathes in the moisture-heavy air of Lah’mu, as she hides in the grass. She breathes in so sharply it hurts as her mother fires first, as the air crackles with the sound of blaster fire once, then again as the stormtroopers in black fire. A second late, since there was never time for the order to come. And stormtroopers, however specialized, wait on orders.

The air is still crackling as both the man in white and her mother fall down. Neither of them gets up, and Jyn doesn’t see what happens next- she is the first to move, to run so hard it hurts to breathe. Keeps hurting, right until Saw Gererra holds out his hand. 

She breathes and- inhales a drop of water, and wakes up sputtering. 

Wakes up alone, in her own quarters, catches her breath before she stands up and checks the ceiling for any sign of a drip.

The converted water frigate doesn’t store water anymore, hasn’t in years, but the General warned Jyn - warned Kestrel Dawn- when she came on board that water still clung to the ship’s metal bones. It seeps, sometimes, from the walls, especially the nearer they come to the orbit of a sun. 

She doesn’t find a drip. But it was there, and she cannot, does not try, to go back to sleep.

Kestrel Dawn has, of late, been burning her days with Reekeene’s Roughnecks, Irregular unit of the Rebel Alliance. 

They are a crew of sixty-some on a freighter that could hold four times that number, and sometimes does, depending on who needs pickups. The freighter acts as a mobile base, reporting back to Alliance Command only by communications bounced through five satellites.

Kestrel has only been here two-odd months, let herself be recruited only because she was out of places to go and had to regroup. She’s stayed this long because-

Because her fellow recruits started calling her “Kes” and just assuming she would watch their backs. 

Because on the night they raided an Imperial prison, General Reekeene in the thick among her soldiers, Kestrel said, taut and for once unable to stop herself, “I was born in prison,” and the General did not so much as raise her eyebrow before saying, “I was married in one.” 

Because the General’s husband is a tinkering engineer and strategizer, no soldier, with a quiet voice everyone listens to, whose absentminded smiles leave Kestrel feeling cut, whenever she catches one.   

Because the leaking freighter’s name is  _Home_. 

So Kestrel goes and burns the rest of her night on the range for target practice, her breathing as steady as her shot, and tries not to think beyond the next minute.

She’s not surprised when she’s called into the General’s office, not long after they make a long-ship pickup. 

Still not thinking past the next minute, even as she registers the man leaning in the office corner like an insouciant shadow. The General herself is in full light- the deep tone of her skin even darker at the circles under her eyes. She gives Kestrel a measuring look- not at all the same kind of measuring look of a week before, when she’d told Kestrel she was on the fast track to sergeant - and stands to her full impressive height. 

“Sit down, Dawn,” General Reekeene says.

Kestrel almost protests. She bites her cheeks, feels her chin jut up- and sits down. She actively doesn’t look at the man in the corner.

“Jyn Erso,” the General says. It’s not a question, but it still feels like there’s a question lurking in it. 

It’s the first time anyone has said her true name aloud since Saw. She allows herself one sharp but silent breath and tilts her chin a shade higher. 

“This is Captain Cassian Andor,” Reekeene says, and he steps forward, so Kestrel’s forced to slide her eyes in his direction. “One of our friends from Intelligence.”

He pauses, long enough for her to study him and be weighed in his eyes in turn. He’s young but older than her, dark-eyed, dark-haired. His posture, his expression are professionally at ease. It does not conceal the tightness lurking in every line of him, from the crease between his eyebrows on down.

“When was the last time you were in contact with your father?” he says.

_Which one?_ she almost says. But _father_ has always meant Galen to her, and she knows that’s who Captain Andor means, too. 

“Fifteen years ago,” she says flatly. Her mother down, the man in white down, Galen - gone, taken by the troopers in black. She can still hear Saw’s hoarse voice say, _he let the wrong death take him_.

It’s an expected progression, when, moments later, Andor’s asking her how long it’s been since she was in contact with Saw Gererra. If Saw would meet with her if she came as a friend.

“You take me to Saw to say ‘we’re all friends here, we’re all rebels, aren’t we?’ Then - what?” she asks, folding her arms. She’s dropped the posture of Kestrel Dawn, Alliance Irregular in her General’s office, and is slouching back in her seat like the criminal they recruited. She angles her head for a better glare. “If you’re looking for his return to the fold, well. The words ‘lost cause’ might not mean much in this company, but in Saw’s case-”

“There’s a pilot,” Captain Andor interrupts, the lines around his eyes tighter still, and explains about the Imperial defector on Jedha, being held by Saw. About the pilot’s claims about a superweapon. 

The pilot who says her father sent him. 

It’s the General who tells her the rest of Andor’s mission is then to find Galen Erso, if possible. Stop the superweapon, if possible.

“If the story’s authenticated,” General Reekeene finishes, and Andor, his eyes on Reekeene, shakes his head minutely. 

It’s a small motion - but it tells Jyn three things. Intelligence considers the superweapon’s existence as good as authenticated already. Reekeene was briefed on this before they called for Kestrel. And it’s bad enough that the General is refusing to fully accept its truth.

Jyn nods, feeling as if she’s made of tensile wire. Captain Andor’s glance skirts across her jaw, analyzing her facial movements. 

“What if I say no?” she says. “I forfeit my berth here, and you take me anyway, at blasterpoint, or drop me off back on Ord Mantell without resources. Am I close?”

Andor recrosses his arms and says, voice harsh, “You’ve been with the Alliance - what, two months? Taking safe harbor here from the bounty on your head-”

“Thank you, Captain,” Reekeene interrupts. “We did know about the bounty, at least. Kestrel - Jyn - do you have a preference?”

“Jyn’ll do,” she says.

“I understand Captain Andor is authorized to provide you with an offer of compensation,” Reekeene says. Reekeene, who used to be a mercenary, head of a private corporation’s mercenary crew, who hasn’t worked for pay for longer than Jyn has been alive. “Should you decline your orders. I told him I did not expect that to be necessary. Is that something we should discuss?”

Jyn is silent for a long, long time. She stayed too long, she thinks, but she’s also thinking about the next minute now, and the next, and the next…

“No, marm,” she says to General Reekeene. “It won’t be necessary.” She shifts her gaze to Andor and adds dryly, “I’m owed two months of backpay, anyway. How much does the Alliance owe you?”

His lip doesn’t twitch, but something changes about the way he’s studying her.

“More,” he says simply.

A lot more, she suspects. She sits up straighter in her chair, smirks.

“However, General, I’d like to discuss my promotion to Sergeant...”

  
  


* * *

Less than an hour later, her meager kit bundled up and her quarters fully emptied, a reprogrammed Imperial droid is introducing himself to her on a U-wing. Even the droid knows her real name, which is - unsettling. 

“No goodbyes?” Captain Andor asks her, as he boards. 

“I’ll be back or I won’t, there’s no point in fussing,” Jyn says, more sharply than necessary. 

Her three fellow recruits were brought in as a team, former petty scammers who’d been keeping each other alive for a few years - two humans and one meter-tall Squib, all male, all more than happy to adjust to having a woman among their crew and to follow her orders every time she ended up taking lead. Which has been every time, so far, from the disastrous recruitment rendezvous to the six strikes and one intel mission they’ve been sent on together...

They’re going to be upset Kestrel Dawn didn’t say goodbye. Would want to come along. 

“Ship’s name aside, this isn’t  _home_ ,” she adds. “I just haven’t got anywhere better to be.” 

She reckons she’s given Andor the answer he’s been expecting. 

“Jyn Erso,” calls a voice that has never used that name before, and Andor gives her a nod that as good as says _So, one goodbye, then_. 

She raises a hand to the top of the ship’s exit, pushing off the metal a little as she hops down. 

General Reekeene’s white-bearded husband, Mikka Reekeene, is at sixty a few years older than his wife and much less fit in appearance, though Jyn’s seen him move his bulkier former down  _Home_ 's hallways in a hurry. He’s standing a little ways from the ship. 

She’s relieved it’s Mikka and not any of her erstwhile teammates-  particularly not the one who’s been making moon eyes at her since they met. 

Still, she’s surprised. She’s had little enough to say to the General’s husband in her time here. Conversations with Mikka always come around to the ship’s latest customizations or his never-ending work developing a hyperspace alternator sequencing module, and Jyn, daughter of Galen notwithstanding, has nothing to contribute to engineering discussions.

“I know of your father,” Mikka says once she’s approached. It’s with an effort that she keeps from stepping back. “Never met him, of course. But the name. An eminent man, once- many in my field wondered what happened to him.”

“They’re not the only ones,” Jyn says.

Mikka nods. “He wasn’t the only good one gone, either.”

He doesn’t specify good _what_ , so Jyn doesn’t contradict him.

“Was there something else you wanted?” she asks, adding a ‘sir’ only because call-me-Mikka doesn’t like it. 

“I don’t know Captain Andor, but I know the man who sent him,” Mikka said. He pauses. “Andor likely has orders to eliminate your father. Strategically, for the Captain’s health and your own, I gauge it wiser for you to be prepared for that in advance. And so, while you are still on our ship, I am making that decision.” 

She doesn’t breathe.

Mikka has to reach and take her limp hand to shake it goodbye. 

“Farewell, Kestrel Dawn,” he says. “Good luck, Jyn Erso. I hope to one day see you on _Home_ again.”

Captain Andor has his headset on and is in the cockpit when she climbs back on board. Her hand drifts over her blaster, just checking, and catches the droid’s attention.

“Why does she get to be armed while I don’t?” K-2SO complains.

Andor glances over his shoulder at her.

With more mirth than grimness, he tells the droid, “The sergeant outranks you.”

She sits down behind them as K-2 says, with quite a lot of tone for a mechanical voice, “It’s been over _seven years_. Am I not due for recognition over a delinquent?”

Jyn starts to mutter _Apparently not_ , but Captain Andor says it first. He catches the start of her words, catches her scowl at his own, and doesn’t bother hiding his frown as he turns back to navigating the U-wing out of _Home_ ’s hangar.

Jyn Erso puts her hand to the string that keeps her kyber crystal snug at her neck. A dampness clings to the U-wing, from sitting with its doors open in the former water freighter. No drip, but a taste of dewiness still in the air.  

The air circulates, before they even enter hyperspace, and, like Dawn, that trace of dew is instantly gone.

  
  



	2. right on cue

“Tell me about the weapon,” Jyn says, to Cassian. Andor, she corrects in her head. _Andor likely has orders to eliminate your father._

But K-2SO calls Captain Andor ‘Cassian’, and it’s sticking too easily in Jyn’s mind, by the end of the first hour in hyperspace.

“The planet killer, you said,” she prompts. “What do we know?”

“We?” he says.

“I’m Rebel Alliance, same as you,” she says, expecting ‘same’ will needle him. He doesn’t let it show, if it does.

It needles K-2SO.

“You are not the same as Cassian,” he says, a little aghast. “Rebel Intelligence has been seeking ‘Jyn Erso’ for four years, and only months ago did you-”

“ _K_ ,” Cassian interrupts, shushing him.

“Four years,” she repeats, not sure if she should be thinking _so long_ or _only four_. She’s amused either way. “How much trouble is my recruitment agent in?”

“Plenty, presumably,” K-2 says with relish, but Cassian shrugs a little as he angles toward her, the streaming lines of light framing him.  

“Kestrel Dawn was a viable recruit, for the Roughnecks,” he says. “They could use you, and there was no tracing that identity back to ‘Jyn Erso’ - we came at it from the other way around. It won’t be held against him. It’s certainly faster, to find you among us, than, say, breaking you out of Imperial prison.”

She only _nearly_ went to prison - the latest time, anyway. Interesting, to think she would have had a way out after all. If only because she was of _use_.

“ _You_ wouldn’t have recruited her, though,” K-2 says very pointedly, to Cassian.

Cassian doesn’t contradict that. There’s a flicker of amusement about him, for a moment, but it goes out the second he sees it isn’t returned.

The Roughnecks, at least, wanted her for her skill set, rather than capitalizing on connections she couldn’t help having.

“Tell me about the weapon,” she repeats.

K-2 advises against, but Cassian mutters something about the length of the trip. He stands up and sits across from her, against the opposite wall of the ship. She can see every tear and dirt speck on the vest he’s wearing, especially against the yellow patch on his right shoulder.

He tells her about whispers. He tells her about an eight-card datapack obtained on a mission to Darkknell that _all but_ confirms the building of a battle station. Before the Imperial Senate, the datapack would be dismissable as conspiracy, a fake, an abandoned plan from decades back.

To Rebel Intelligence, it’s material requirements that explain Imperial presence on outlying planets, labor needs that connect to the disappearance of convicts and whole convoys of Wookie slaves, construction details from Geononis that likely explains the vicious and mysterious sterilization of the entire planet some five years after Empire Day. It’s been a chase list, a bundle of leads-

“Your father’s name was all over the final datacard,” Cassian says, voice quiet in a way that only makes it more intense. “As was the name _Orson Krennic_. That mean anything to you?”

She couldn’t have told him the name of the man in white. She knows it, upon hearing it - an echo of whispers, too, in Saw’s voice, her parents’ voices, including louder, welcoming sounds, from longer ago. Her parents, with drinks in their hand, the skyline of Coruscant, a kiss goodnight and the name _Stardust_ -

“Krennic,” she repeats, as if it’s a curse. “His men killed my mother.” She bites down on her lip before adding, “She killed him first.”

Cassian leans forward, on automatic, the first jerky motion she’s seen him make. He looks as if he’s going to say something. He doesn’t.

“That would explain why Krennic’s name has failed to appear on any intercepted transmissions,” K-2 says, from the cockpit. “One also must wonder which parental unit you take after, Jyn Erso.”

Cassian grimaces.

“Reprogrammed him yourself, did you?” Jyn says archly.

“Did I admit to that already?” Cassian says, and for a second there’s something boyish about him. She looks away.

“No, you didn’t,” K-2 informs him. “And yes. He did.”

 

* * *

 

Jedha, for a desert planet, is unexpectedly cold. She thinks the fur-lined coat Captain Cassian Andor dons is ridiculously unnecessary until they’re out in the desert wind, K-2 unwillingly left behind on the ship.

She wraps her scarf more around her face, as they head toward the walled city.  

They blend their way in, among pilgrims, tourists - it’s a city that’s at once vibrant and crushed. Jyn’s avoided areas of heavy occupation - Imperial entanglements are less likely to be fatal when there’s fewer Imperials around. The weight of it in this once-holy place makes her feel… a good amount more than she’s comfortable feeling, that’s for sure.

The presence is heavier, no doubt, than usual, because of the pilot. Six hundred credits simply for information on him, she overhears - that’s more than the price on Kestrel Dawn’s _head_.  

Cassian’s plan to find Saw is startling in its simplicity and chancy as a card game. Not at all what she expected from him. Find a missing contact’s sister, give the name “Jyn Erso” to the sister - not a rebel, just one’s sister -  and hope that gets them a meeting.

“Hope?” she repeats, incredulous.

“Yeah,” he says. “Rebellions are built on hope.”

They are in a crowded street on an occupied moon, his voice cast low and urgent, but still the words roll off his tongue naturally, more tide than fire but just as invulnerable. That’s hope - his eyes and voice just now-

Not at all what she expected from him.

He likely has orders to kill her father. Two stormtroopers walk by, and her eyes follow them. If those are his orders, he’s lying to her with each step by her side.

“C’mon,” Cassian hisses, the faintest touch of his hand at her back propelling her. She’s stood still in the street a moment too long.

If her father built a planet killer, the orders wouldn’t be wrong.

Except - he sent a pilot. He sent the pilot… and in her dreams, he still calls her Stardust.

“May the Force of others be with you,” a voice is calling, again and again. The speaker, when she finds him, is a milky-eyed man in a charcoal robe.

“And you, with the necklace,” the man calls, as she and Cassian propel right past.

Jyn slows, suddenly enough that it’s only Cassian’s reflexes that keep him from tripping over her foot.

He’s walking too close to her, anyway. Or maybe she’s walking too close to him. They keep orbiting around each other, staying close in the press of people.

“Yes, I’m talking to you,” the blind man continues, amused, his voice lifted over the crowd but not a shout. “Would you trade that necklace for a glimpse into your future?”

“Keep walking,” Cassian says. The touch of his hand at her back is steadier this time.

Jyn’s half-twisting, looking after the blind man, even as she lets Cassian keep them going. “How did he know-”

“His partner, behind him,” Cassian says, with a nod - there’s another man in the shadows, his hulking size accentuated by red plastoid armor. “When I said to act like a tourist, I didn’t-”

“It’s a con,” she says, annoyed he clocked it before she did. She let herself be thrown and not only feels like a fool, but let herself look like one - so much worse.  “I get it. Who are they?”

He tells her they’re the Guardians of the Whills. Protectors of the Kyber Temple, once. Troublemakers, today.

She doesn’t tell Cassian the necklace she’s wearing is kyber crystal.

She wonders, though.

 

* * *

They find the sister of Cassian’s contact at the temple, as expected.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t care about Saw Gerrera, or the cause, or the message Cassian’s asking her to deliver.

She wants to know where her brother is, and there’s a breathy hysteria about her that tells Jyn she on some level already knows.

“Tivik always comes here,” the woman says, still looking around. The worry makes her already soft face look like it’s melting.  “He always meets me, after every off-planet run - but the others are back, I’ve seen them, they’re-- he’ll come, though.”

“You can confirm what’s happened, with Saw’s men, when you deliver our message,” Cassian says smoothly, his hand on her arm. “If he didn’t come back with the others-”

“Why wouldn’t he, though?” The woman’s eyes aren’t as soft as her face, and they snap to Cassian. She lowers his voice. “You’re his contact, I know it, he’d sent you the message to meet-”

“Easy, easy,” Cassian says, his voice gentle but rapid at once, his hands up. “I was detained, that’s why I came here…” He goes on reassuring her, persuading her to take their message. “Find out what you can about your brother. We’ll find out anything you can’t.”

“Promise?”

Cassian hesitates for just a fraction of a second before promising. Tivik’s sister doesn’t notice. Jyn does.

The woman agrees, and listens to Cassian’s message and emphasis of its importance. Cassian has Jyn remove her scarf so the woman can get a good look at her, to describe her if asked.

The woman has a dazed, frozen look on her face, as Jyn stares at her square on.

“Janessa, here to speak to Saw, as a friend from the Alliance,” the woman repeats back to Cassian.

“Jyn Erso,” Cassian corrects, each syllable careful and sharp on his tongue, and makes Tivik’s sister repeat it until she’s got it right. They make plans to meet with her again tomorrow.

Jyn waits until they’re long away from the poor woman, back in the midst of the crowd.

“You killed him, didn’t you,” Jyn says. “Her brother.”

He glances at her once, with a sort of cold surprise, and resumes moving through the streets, checking in every direction.

She stays close, matching his pace so exactly her shoulder brushes his arm.

“Aren’t you going to tell me you had no choice?”

His eyes are grim and still scanning the crowd as he replies, almost absently, “There’s always a choice.”

 _Not a stormtrooper, then_. She thinks it, her eyes narrowed, then goes right ahead and says it, aloud.

It’s his turn to stop still, going rigid beside her.

“ _What?_ ” he says, and every time she’s thought his voice went harsh before this has nothing on that ragged tear.

“Take it as a compliment,” she says, keeping her voice bland, and before he can demand further what she means, she crooks her arm through his. There’s an actual stormtrooper, watching them.  

“How, exactly, did we move from murder to compliments?” he says. Aware of their audience, he no longer appears agitated, but his voice, almost against her ear, is no less angry.

She could say _it’s usually the other way around, isn’t it?_   She doesn’t think it would improve his mood. Instead, she tells him something true, something she learned after sixteen.

“Choices are harder than orders,” she says, sliding her arm away. She tilts her head, to briefly meet his eyes. “Better, though.”

She expects, from the look back she gets, for him to murmur that _following orders is a choice_ , _and the most important one_. He doesn’t. 

They keep moving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're wondering if Krennic's *really* dead - oh, no, yup, he's super dead; that's the butterfly effect difference I've taken here to get Rogue One into the EU- Lyra fired a second sooner and hit Krennic's heart instead of his shoulder. 
> 
> All the tangles of the EU Death Star creation/plan theft backstory aside, they had one commonality : Tarkin was shown to have been completely running the show. And so - the troopers take Galen to Tarkin; Tarkin keeps most of Krennic's role to himself rather than delegating again; with the change of command- what planets construction takes place on, and where the plans are going, and how the news leaks out.... shifts, just slightly, over to the EU backstory. 
> 
> (Or more accurately to the approximation I'm running with, since, for example, you will not be hearing about a planet named [“Despayre”](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Despayre) beyond this note because I cannot quite bring myself to go quite as hilariously Power-Ranger-90s as Despair-with-a-Y... even while embracing double-k [Darkknell](http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darkknell). 
> 
> GEEKY FUN FACT: the alternate (aka someone got it confused with its system once or also refused to use 'Despayre' seriously) name for Despayre is Horuz. 
> 
> Horuz is name-dropped in the Rogue One novelization as one of the 16 'strategically insignificant' worlds where the Empire suspiciously has stuff going on. 
> 
> Got to love a good Easter Egg- and the impression that gives that it's a slightly shuffled version of Old Canon. ;D)


	3. keeps me searching

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "When did you befriend the con artists?"

The control panels for the Death Star’s Concave Dish Composite Beam Superlaser are constructed on Toprawa. There’s a delay in the final construction, a slight change of plans made on-planet, due to orders from Galen Erso’s facility.

Aside from the overseeing engineer, the construction team on Toprawa no idea what they’re working on. The Rebel Alliance cell on Toprawa does not have the same scraps put together as the Alliance’s central Intelligence. Not enough to know this is no terraforming operation. This is no tool for mineral harvesting.

“It’s a sodding space station,” Bodhi Rook says, near tears. “Please, please - listen- ”

Saw Gerrera, the man he has been sent to, is good at many things.

Listening has never been one.

* * *

 

Jyn is developing a certain sympathy for K-2. “Wait here,” Cassian told the droid, again, on the ship, before they trekked back to the temple.

“Wait here,” he said to her, as he left her against the temple wall. It’s been half an hour.

She leans her head against the temple wall and blows out a breath.

A man leans against the wall several arm spans away from her. She jerks her head to the side, quickly, but the impulse toward conflict fades as she finds herself recognizing one of the Guardians. He leans easily against the wall, eyes closed in the sun.

“You’re the one who spotted my necklace,” she says.

The man snorts. He cracks one eye open under his wild hair.

“Some called us brothers, when I too was a Guardian,” he says. “ _No one_ has ever commented on our resemblance.”

“You’re the eyes,” she pushes, meaning in their gimmick. “For the man who called out to me.”

“His name,” the man grunts, “is Chirrut Îmwe.”

“Where is he, your friend?” Jyn asks, suspiciously, looking around.

The man’s armored shoulders lift in a shrug, against the wall.

“Following yours,” he says.

That doesn’t bode well. Done waiting, Jyn peels off the wall and hustles into the temple.

Tivik’s sister had been hovering near the steps, yesterday. This is Jyn’s first foray into the temple itself. Much of it is a tremendously large open courtyard, but smaller pavilions within clearly once had roofs, pried off long ago. Flaky bits of fresco and imperfect crystal shards ghost between legs of species of all kinds. The stone floor, as dusty and worn as the city’s streets but smoother, more polished, beneath her boots. A stormtrooper stalks the crenellated walls.

It feels like a small city within the city. There is a market inside, of colorful wares and trinkets someone is hollering a Jedi once touched, once wore. One man is auctioning off a brown robe with scorch marks.

The disgust of the armored man behind her comes off him in waves.

There’s an area cordoned off by Imperials - not just the towering center of the temple, with cargo ships nearby, but a fresh spot of trouble. Jyn presses close to the crowd, slipping near enough to see, though she has to make an undignified hop or two -

It’s Tivik’s sister, dead on the ground, stormtroopers treating it like a crime scene.

She said her brother’s name so many times Jyn remembers it - she never caught the woman’s own.

Jyn is on the move at once, looking for Cassian. The man in armor catches her eyes - it’s a trap, it’s a con, she thinks, as he trundles off toward a dark corner of the temple, but she tails him. There are etchings on the stone walls that may have once been fine - they’re covered in graffiti now. The armored man gives her a small nods, as if to say, _after you_.

Down the narrow way, Cassian is in a standoff and seems to be trying to talk his way out of it. His blaster’s trained dead between the eyes of the presumable leader, but there’s four more men aiming at him, crouched at various levels so they can all aim in a space barely wide enough for two. They’re dressed like locals - Saw’s men, not Imperials.

Jyn reaches for her truncheon.

“Hello,” she calls toward them, brazen, unsure of the state of their message. “I’m the daughter of Galen Erso.”

It’s too narrow and straight a hallway for her to see the passage tucked on its inner wall. She realizes it’s there too late, as a terribly familiar click-step comes from it, turning in her direction, and a click like a comm. The click’s followed quickly by a “Hands up!” - through the distinctive static of a stormtrooper helmet.

Figures in armor stream out of that unseen space in the wall, facing right and left- there’s only two of them, a patrol, but in the narrow passage they make a wall of white.

Jyn’s hands are lifted- with her truncheon in them.

“Don’t point your blasters at a Daughter,” a voice, free of static, calls from down the passage. “It’s a religious order.”

The stormtrooper facing Jyn glances, distracted and thrown by this unexpected declaration, toward the voice - and one of Saw’s men starts shooting, the trooper toward Cassian immediately returning fire.

Jyn’s already dropped to the ground and rolling, going for their legs with the truncheon in the process, hoping Cassian Andor is handling himself with Saw’s men on the other side. As she stands, the knocked-down trooper grabs at her scarf, clawing upright himself, and she has to whirl on her heel to unwind it to escape his pull. She gets her blaster out mid-spin and shoots one trooper in the chink between his helmet and shoulder armor when she steadies. The blasts are leaving marks and chips on the temple’s already damaged walls; she’s cleared the wall of white in time for her to see one of Saw’s men turn his weapon toward her - just barely, when a close-range blast from Cassian, wresting free of a man he’s knocked to the ground in time to fire, hits the soldier between the eyes, first.

Two more troopers come out of the wall - no, fall, fall forward, knocked in a stack.

The blind man, staff in hand, steps out of the passage after them, and Jyn, surprised, trains her blaster on him for a second.

He seems to follow the movement, despite his lack of sight, gives her a startlingly bright smile before knocking the end of the staff into the stomach of a trooper rushing from behind him, hard enough to send him flying.

The armored man hasn’t even bothered moving from his spot leaning against the wall behind Jyn - though there’s a trooper down behind her with blast marks she didn’t cause - and Cassian is unscathed, crouched to check the pulses of Saw’s men, who are all on the ground themselves.

She retrieves her scarf from a dead man’s armored grip and sidles closer to Cassian, checking behind her for oncomers.

Cassian glances up, nods to her. A chunk of fur is missing from his jacket’s hood. He pulls one of Saw’s men - unconscious, not dead- upright, and slings the man’s arm over his shoulder.

“This could have gone better,” he says, surveying their exits. “When did you befriend the con artists?”

“Not sure,” Jyn says. She takes the man’s other arm and half his weight, wondering if they’re really going to attempt the old ‘drunken friend’ gag.

“Have you considered,” the blind man says, “that when sincerity is on both sides, even a trick may not be a con?”

“We need to go,” the armored man says, from his position at the end of the hallway. “You should lose the baggage,” he adds, of Saw’s man.

“We need him,” Cassian says.

“This way, then.” The blind man - Chirrut Îmwe, Jyn remembers - steps back into the narrower passage he came from, and from where he’s gone, a slow, old grind of stone on stone sounds.

The armored man rolls his eyes and strides forward. He’s twice their age, but strong - takes Saw’s man’s weight off their hands easily, hefts him over his shoulders.

Cassian exchanges a quick look with Jyn, and they follow Chirrut into the passage, to find he’s lifted one of the temple floor’s flagstones with his staff. There’s a passage of steps, made of beige rock, leading into darkness. On each side of the steps - immediate darkness.

The armored man has to turn sideways to get himself into the narrow alley. He drops Saw’s man, ungraciously, a few steps down.

There’s the sound of approaching marching feet, boots of hard plastoid hitting rock - regrouped reinforcements, coming to check out blaster fire.

Jyn drops herself down into the dark, and the others come after.

Chirrut follows last, using his stick to move the flagstone back into place over their heads.

“Thank yous are accepted in the form of temple donations,” he says, not sounding particularly serious. He moves around them, leading the way down. “Hustle, before they hear.”

“No lights,” the armored man warns, hefting Saw’s man again with a grunt. “Even stormtroopers won’t miss that shining up through the stone.”

Cassian’s hand finds Jyn’s forearm. Instinctively she goes to shake him off, not needing a guiding hand nor wanting his in particular. She stops herself at the last second, not wanting to throw off his balance and send him falling down one of the apparent abysses on either side of the stairs.

“Is it dark?” Chirrut says innocently, already ahead of them all. “How didn’t I notice?”

A while later, they must be half a mile underground, still on the crumbling stairs, when given the okay to turn on the small flashlight Cassian carries. No complaints about the weight on his shoulders from the armored man - “Baze Malbus,” Chirrut introduces him. Cassian pauses to check the pulse of Saw’s man, offers to take the weight back.

Baze declines, huffing, “He’s only a boy. A too-skinny one.”

The boy’s not regaining consciousness quickly and, Jyn, once a too-skinny girl in Saw’s army, is highly doubtful he’d give up Saw’s location. Or that her name would mean anything to this child.

Cassian studies the two men in the dim circle of his light. “Can you get us to Saw Gerrera?”

“Captain,” Chirrut says. It takes Jyn a second to register that no one has spoken Cassian’s title in his hearing. “We are no lackeys of that man, or any other. But where else did you suppose we were going?”

 

* * *

 

Saw is holed up somewhere called the Catacombs of Cadera - this is known, to the two men, though meant to be highly secret.

The passage they are taking gets them out of the city, puts their feet on flat sand, looking up at Jedha City’s mesa. With the shifting sands, there’s no underground passage; all of the moon’s tunnels live only in its rocks and ruins.

Cassian comms K-2SO before they start their trek across the sand. Jyn hears him, hissing, “You’re where? Never mind, get back to the ship, we may need pickup in a hurry.” He instructs K-2 to move the ship closer to where they’re heading- not too close, though, not enough to attract attention.

Jedi were buried in the catacombs, Chirrut tells them, as well as Guardians.  

Cassian asks why they’re helping them, at this moment, in a careful way that suspects an ultimatum. If Chirrut asks for her necklace, Jyn thinks, remembering his interest, she’ll-

“All we do is as the Force wills it,” Chirrut says, before she finishes the thought. His stick is held like a ropewalker’s for the moment, as if testing his balance walking through the sand.

“All we do is as _you_ will it,” Baze corrects, and Chirrut tells them Baze was once the most devoted of the Guardians of the Whills.

Jyn glances behind at the armored man, Saw’s boy still hefted on his back.

“What’re you guardian of now?” she asks. It’s unmistakable, to someone with her background, that much of his gear is clearly assassin’s wear - either taken off one, or used by Baze himself for that purpose.

“His whims,” Baze grumbles.

Cassian is a step ahead of her, only the left side of his face visible from her angle. She still sees his closed-mouth half-smile, and it stops her own.

* * *

 

They know they’ve reached Saw’s compound - half a day’s walk, enough windburn and mouthfuls of sand to make Jyn wish for a better head covering, and two shared ration bars later- when they hit the first guard.

“Would they stop trying to shoot us before we can speak to them,” Cassian hisses in frustration, after they’re forced to stun the woman who jumps out at them -- not with their blaster settings, all firmly on ‘kill’, but with quick blows to the head from two different kinds of sticks.

“This isn’t the ‘talk first’ part of the Rebellion,” Jyn says.

Cassian, before he turns his flashlight off, gives her an unreadable look. “I’d noticed.”

He’d given her an accounting of what happened in the marketplace that she thinks she believes - Tivik’s sister was shot from behind as soon as she approached him; he pursued and attempted parley, less than successfully. It aligns with Saw’s treatment of informants of any kind - it offers little in the way of hope.

While they try to rouse the guard - a woman, who Jyn finds vaguely familiar - Baze points out their ideal entrance in a low mesa that connects to the main catacombs. Chirrut answers for him, when asked how Baze knows it - that he’d considered a contract on Saw a while ago, and ended up stopping someone else who’d taken it, instead.

“Do we really want to go through Saw Gerrera’s back door?” Cassian asks Jyn. “I don’t think he’ll like us the better for it.”

“Well, not you,” she says. It’ll buy them the better chance of talking, though - fewer numbers- and of doing that talking from somewhere other than a cell.

The blast door they enter isn’t tidily built into the side of the catacombs - it’s a part of an old ship, jammed into the rock and loosely disguised, with wires like a droid’s innards all about it. They get the woman fighter awake enough to march with them to the door. They show her the alive man Baze has carried all this way, give the woman Jyn’s name.

She doesn’t look impressed but agrees that Saw will want to see them and verify if it’s true, enough for her to open the door.

Inside, there’s an alarming lack of further guards that has Jyn on edge, checking for booby traps. They reach a cavern with a control panel and the woman indicates she needs to use it to summon Saw.

It’s a risk. It’s a hope they have to follow.

Cassian lets the woman use the panel, and a grate opens, at once.  

Something is moving, slithering - no, more writhing - in the dark.

The first tendril, tentacle, reaches out.

Jyn doesn’t wait to find out what it is to start shooting. Cassian’s aiming more carefully, just at the tentacles moving toward them, even as the face - the monster seems to be mostly face, eyes on a central body and tentacles everywhere- comes into view.

Their shots seem to be having no effect, not in stopping it, though the thing makes noises every time a blast lands on its blobby form. Cassian switches his aim to the eyes - hits one, right as the longest of the tentacles lashes, winds up Jyn’s ankle, going for her head-

She can’t get an angle on herself, and is grappling for her truncheon to pry it. Cassian’s stepping quickly around her, a tight circle, eyes darting for a way to do just that without injuring her. Instead of continuing to aim for the eyes, he seems more intent on stopping it from touching her head and blasts the tentacle on her shoulder as it moves toward her ear- it stops short but doesn’t let go, tightening around her waist and pinning her arm-

It recoils, unwinding, right as the sound of multiple blasts follow the flash of red lights.

Baze Malbus has dropped the man over his shoulder, pulled out his gun, and sent out a series of blasts that outnumber the thing’s tentacles.

The thing’s _screaming_ , a sound that makes Jyn put her hands to her ears, fully expecting blood. It retreats, back into the cavern, and Baze goes to fire again but Chirrut’s voice halts him.

“There’s no darkness in it,” Chirrut says, keeping the conscious guard pinned with his staff. “The creature is what it is.”

“I know what it is,” Cassian says, sounding as if he very much thinks there’s darkness in it. “Did it get in your head?” he says, urgently, to Jyn.

The scream has set off a siren, though it takes Jyn a while to realize it’s not just a ringing in her ears. The woman, she notices, has fled, and the blaster fire would have drawn attention anyway.

“ _In_ my head?” she repeats, shaking her head in both confusion and denial. Cassian lets out a breath of relief.

There’s a metal clang, and ventilated breathing, and suddenly Saw’s men are rushing into the room in force -”up, hands up,” Cassian says, dropping his weapon more easily than she’s able to imitate - and there’s that voice. The last one, for so long, to call her Jyn.

“I am not so feeble yet that I will not be the first to defend-”

“Saw,” she calls, before they start shooting, lifting her hands higher still, to the back of her head.

She steps forward despite the guns trained on her, and Saw has his own hand up, a halt to his men, as he appears in her sight line and she in his. His mouth parts.

He looks - so very old, a shell of the man who handed her a blaster and a knife, and there is something feeble about him, never there before. He moves his raised hand - still powerful enough that his men fall back at the motion.

“Jyn?” he rasps, beyond further words for a moment.

She was prepared to shout at him, feels the bitterness and embers of anger still - but more than that, looking at him, she wants to cry.  

Like a gauntlet as metal as his body, she throws out her next words.

“Sergeant Erso,” she says, “here to treat with you on behalf of the Rebel Alliance.”


	4. keep imagining meeting

_ Sergeant Erso of the Rebel Alliance_. 

It’s true, but it’s a lie, too. It makes it sound as if she’s been with the cause all this time - makes it sound like she never broke, alone in that turret and realizing he wasn’t coming back, and worse, a few days later, when she knew for sure it wasn’t that Saw was dead that kept him away. Makes it sound like she didn’t barter for her title.

It will get them what they want, she thinks, but Saw only stares.

The next words are harder. “Here as a friend,” she adds, gesturing with her half-lowered hands to the vaguely-stirring boy on the floor who Baze has carried all this way.

Saw’s mouth moves, without words, for a long moment.

“Jyn,” again, is what he says at last, but adds, “my girl,” this time. The words come out a little broken, and horribly, horrendously pleased.

The lie of it all is burning in her throat ready to burst out in accusations, burning with another feeling entirely in her eyes.

“With me, then,” Saw says, beckoning.

Just to her. His soldiers circle Cassian, Chirrut, reclaim their boy from near Baze’s feet.

“We’re  _ all  _ friends here,” she says urgently, and only then realizes they’re the same words she’d proposed so sarcastically back upon hearing this plan.

“Friends?” Saw says. “I see local trouble. And this other one - a  _ spy  _ -”

Jyn’s not sure if Saw’s drawing from delusions, jumping from conclusions based on what he knows of Alliance Operations, or, least likely, actually has information from Intelligence of his own.

She sidesteps closer to Cassian.

“He came with me,” she said, hands creeping lower still, till she looks less like a surrendering threat. “He’s my partner. Goes where I go. Hears what I hear.”

Saw hesitates, undecided, and she needs to push him more.

She pushes her words into much, much more of a lie. “He doesn’t leave me. And when he has to,  _ he _ comes back.”

Cassian’s own hands are still on his head. He’s been watching Saw, throughout, not her, but it suddenly shifts, his not looking at her, from an undeliberate motion to something he is very carefully not doing.

“Bring them both,” Saw says, nodding to two of his men. “Occupy the others.”

Jyn only half-hears Chirrut’s comment that they are, in fact, in need of new occupations - she’s already being moved forward, though Saw’s soldiers are only gesturing with their blasters, rather than prodding her. Cassian gets pushed, a little; he uses the opportunity to stagger a little closer to her.

“Thank you,” he says, more breath than words.

“You wanted to meet him,” she says back, careful in her word choice when their whispers may be overheard. ”Doing my job.”

“Still, that was -” Cassian pauses, and she can briefly see, in his eyes, that he’s choosing a word. “Unexpected.”  

He must have been expecting awfully little of her, then. She shrugs at the man who almost certainly has orders to kill her father and yet has been at her side these past long hours as if they really are partners, this man who makes promises he cannot keep.

_ Give me a reason to trust you_, she wants to say. _Don’t let the Alliance be one more cause not worth whatever faith I have left_. 

“Trust goes both ways,” she says instead.

The motion’s so small, and in the catacombs’ contrast of filtered light and deep shadow, she’s not sure if his answering nod is real or a trick of the light.

 

* * *

They are left alone with Saw, to Jyn’s great surprise - herself, yes, but she wouldn’t have thought he’d allow that with Cassian.

“You have a partner, now,” Saw says, and though he seems to be taking great care with the words, the last ends in a wheeze, has him reaching for a breath mask on his chest. “That’s… something to lose, Jyn.”

The burning feeling in her chest that's been there since the sight of Saw is knocked aside by the comicality of how he seems to be interpreting the word ‘partner’. She put too much of her anger into her lie- Saw took it for something else.

“That’s right,” she says, ignoring any other connotations. “Did you expect I’d never find anything, when you left me? Did you expect me to live, even?”

“I counted on you living,” Saw counters, “that, above all things. I hoped,”  _ that damn word _ , “you would find your way.” There is something gentle that she had forgotten could be in his eyes. “I did not expect to see you again.” And just like that, the gentleness dissipates. “It’s Alliance manipulation, sending-”

“Forgive the interruption,” Cassian says, voice low. His hands are at his sides and slightly outstretched, palms facing the floor, as if he’s approaching a wild animal. “This is a mission of outreach, Saw Gererra. I understand you began some of the protocols, for outreach between the cells - known faces first.”

Saw, if nothing else, knows her face. He doesn’t know Cassian’s - and is now studying it.

“And what cell did you start in?” Saw says, hoarsely, and Jyn’s shoulders stiffen at the danger lurking there.

“I’m a captain in the Alliance to Restore the Republic,” Cassian says, emphasis on  _ Republic_. “It doesn’t matter where I started. It matters where I stand.”   

He certainly picks his moments for honesty. Cassian’s as good as said he started in a Separatist cell by not naming it - and there’s a distinction she hasn’t thought about in a long time, but one which she recalls had troubled Saw, whose only family had perished in the fight against the Separatists, before the Empire.

Saw reaches for his breathing apparatus, takes three deep breaths. He steps away, to stand behind what looks like a holoprojector set into the rock.

“All the Alliance does is stand, and stand,” Saw says. “War is motion. Are you here to end mine… Captain?” Saw’s eyes, though, drift more to Jyn. “When I broke with the politicians, I thought, before I had done, of who they might send to kill me. Would it be the face of a stranger… or a friend?”

“The Alliance isn’t interested in killing you,” Cassian says. Impatience seeps into his tone. “I’m in a position to know.”

“Tell me, Jyn,” Saw says. She waits, for him to take a breath and lower the mask, unsure if she’ll know enough of the workings of inner-circle Alliance politics to answer whatever question he has. He’s fiddling with the holoprojector. “This captain of yours, who knows your real name. What’s his?”

“His-” The name isn’t going to mean anything to Saw; with a sort of dull horror, Jyn registers Saw’s asking out of curiosity, some level of interest in her well-being she thought long dismissed. She vaguely recollects, from another life, being thirteen and teased by Saw’s younger fighters how a conversation like this would go. 

“He’s Cassian Andor, and we’re here for the pilot, Saw,” Jyn says very, very quickly. “You know we are. We know my father sent him here.”

“If the pilot’s still intact,” Cassian says, a concern which catches her off guard. She glances over in time to see his hand tense, tightening in the air around a blaster he isn’t holding. “The cephalopod in your caverns - I know what it is. If it was used, you’ve risked destroying-”

He cuts off, as a hologram fizzles into view. It’s shaky and uneven and still Jyn steps forward, on autopilot.

“Saw,” and it’s her father’s voice, his  _ voice_. His echoes in her dreams had never seemed dim or distant before, but they were only shadows of sound. Galen’s image is opaque, cast in blue, and aged. He looks tired, in a way that it is at once the same as Saw and so much harder to see, so much more changed since she knew this face. 

“I am out of time to explain myself, but if you’re watching this, if my young friend has found you, then- perhaps there is a chance to save the Alliance. You know of the project that was planned - know, then, it has come to fruition, under Moff Tarkin’s hand - under my own. We call it the Death Star,” he says, “but I have laid a way to end it, a well-hidden weakness, in the reactor module. Any pressurized explosion -”

The hologram wavers, as Galen Erso turns, looks behind him, then back, speaking more rapidly. “You’ll need the final structural plans- you must intercept them, before Tarkin moves them to Coruscant- he’s moving all of us who have engineered this battle station, Saw, to an unknown location. And I - again - will let myself be taken, without a fight, in the name of buying time.” Galen’s face changes, the professional tone slipping away. “If Jyn’s alive - Jyn, if you’re possibly listening - know that-”

The hologram drops away.

“Play the rest,” Jyn demands, without looking away from where her father’s face appeared. It hasn’t hurt this much to breathe in a long, long time. She can’t think of when - can’t think at all.

“There is no more,” Saw says. “My technician reviewed the data- we searched the pilot-”

“That can’t be,” Jyn says, ragged. Her knees give, and she finds herself braced on something. “That can’t be all there is.  _ Bring him back_.” 

“Where’s the man who brought the message?” Cassian Andor’s voice says, closer than she expected-- he’s what she’s braced on, Jyn realizes dimly, he has a death grip on her arm. “Where’s the pilot?”

She’s still staring and misses Saw’s answer, a hatch holding her distant from the rest of the world. Cassian is quietly throwing galactic locations at Saw, testing for something-  _ Geonosis_, _ the Atrivis sector_, _ Horuz system_, she zones in for - Saw replies with _ Tarkin’s folly _ and a mention of the  _ unknown maw _ ...

Her arm’s being pulled - her feet follow, at a clipped-to-slowness pace, to match Saw’s. They pass soldiers, and it’s all too familiar - she knows none of them, and yet all of them, at once, and she’s a child again, not understanding what Galen Erso means when he says  _ whatever I do, I do to protect you _ , but saying the words Papa wants to hear-  _ I understand, I love you _ \- the first has never been true, and the second, oh, it  _ was _ true and stopped being true and now…

She blinks at the feeling of a staff bumping against her foot. She’s seated, next to Chirrut Îmwe - at a dejarik table, the figures solid and not holographic. Chirrut moves one of the figurines. Baze Malbus is standing behind him, looking grumpy; his heavy repeater cannon is sitting on the lap of Chirrut’s dejarik opponent.

There is an open cell across from her, and both Cassian and Saw are standing inside it, their backs to her.

Chirrut taps her foot with the staff again. “With us again?”

“You better be winning,” she says hoarsely to Chirrut, getting herself up.

“I’m robbing them blind,” he says, earning a harumph from Baze.

It helps her focus. She blinks, removes all stagger from her step, and heads to the door of the cell, where Cassian is crouched in front of a seated man in an Imperial cargo pilot’s outfit. Jyn’s held up enough cargo ships over the years to be plenty familiar with that particular uniform.

“You’re the pilot,” Cassian says, clearly not for the first time. “You brought the message.”

“I’m - yeah,” the pilot says. “I’m the message.”   
  
“You brought the message,” Cassian corrects carefully.   
  
“I’m the pilot-”   
  
“Yes-”   
  
“And I’m the message.”   
  
Cassian lets out a hiss of air.   
  
“What’s the message?” Jyn says, her hand on the wall of the cell. They all look at her. “If you’re the message, what’s the message?”   
  
“It’s- it’s a convoy,” the pilot says, looking up. “Time and place. Last chance, best chance. To get the changes, before they take them to the vaults.”

Cassian gives him a sharp look, then Jyn a sharper one.

“Did you bring proof?” Cassian asks.

“The hologram,” the pilot says.

“That’s it?” Cassian says, and the pilot looks up, offended. 

“Galen said he’d tell you, about me, about them- them, the plans,” the pilot says, impatiently, “for DS-1. In other words, the Death Star. The Death Star, that’s what they’re actually calling it, a little on point, I reckon, but, yeah.”   
  
He seems - more all right than they were assuming.   
  
“Or it’s a trap,” Saw says. “To draw  _ me _ out.”

“Draw out the Alliance,” Jyn corrects, folding her arms. “You don’t have the ships, Saw.”

“Is this - is this not the Rebel Alliance?” the pilot says, looking between them. He’s trembling a little, but clearly making an effort to hold himself steady. Jyn’s done it enough times to recognize it- is doing it now, though she’s not trembling. “I defected, I came for- he said, Saw would know. He said, it’d all be all right, if I told Saw - and it was, it worked, when I shouted it- got him to make that thing leave me, leave my head. The other things they... nothing was so bad as that.”

“Shouted what?” Cassian says, his tone gentle now.

“Stardust,” the pilot says. “Galen said - he wasn’t right, about everything, but that did, it did work.”

“Stardust,” Cassian repeats. He looks over, to Jyn, sees Saw looking at her too. “You know what that means?”

“Of course I know it,” she says, her shock dull. “It’s me.”   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like I was really going to skip over 'trust goes both ways' (or miss the chance to remix Original Trilogy Moments in a way suited to my plot. ;D
> 
> I'm having far too much fun with this and so hope you are too. (Fan fictions are built on hope!)


	5. the shadow stealing light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> feat. remixed arguments and a moving moon.

“Uh,” the pilot says, when left alone with Jyn. Saw’s escorted them through to an empty cavern corridor, where his people won’t see the prisoner let go, where there’s a hidden landing pad that won’t expose the catacombs, and Cassian’s further down around the bend, on the comms and watching for the U-wing’s arrival.

Saw is letting them leave. 

(Jyn had to ask - had to insist - and when Saw clasped her hand in his, at last agreeing, she managed not to flinch away.

“If it’s a trap, don’t let it take you,” Saw said. “If it’s true, follow it to the end. Save the rebellion - save the dream.”

There was no way for her to answer that, but she nodded, like the good little soldier she’d been for him, such a very long time ago, and walked away from him.) 

“What do I call you?” the pilot says to her.   
  
“What?” Jyn says, her attention snapping to him.   
  
“You’re Galen’s daughter,” he said. 

(“Do you know where my father is?” she’d asked, pushing in front of Cassian in the cell, after declaring herself ' Stardust'. 

“No, they were - they were moving him- some of the best pilots, not me, Galen’s ship was already assigned when I left Eadu-”

“Ship to where?” Cassian demanded.

The pilot went to gesture with his still-cuffed hands. “Could you- will you get these off me? I defected-”

“Right, we know,” Jyn said, looking at Saw. He made no moves to uncuff the pilot, and before she could start to argue his case, Cassian had pulled a lock pick from somewhere on his person, repeating his question while undoing the pilot's cuffs.

“That’s the thing, it’s the Moff,” the pilot said. “The order came from him - the orders always come from him- no one knows to where, no one’s been talking. The pilots who’ve been clearing out the scientists, from Horuz, from Patriim - they haven’t come back, you see.” The cuffs came loose in Cassian’s hands, and the pilot rubbed at his freed wrists, restoring circulation. 

_It sounded like eliminating loose ends_. The thought hit, and Jyn, crouched, rocked back onto her heels. Saw’s hand landed on Jyn’s shoulder - she twitched away, that time, out from under it, and didn’t look away from the pilot to see if she’d wounded Saw. 

“You said it’s the best pilots, they’re sending?” Cassian said, making each word sharp even as the quickness of his voice should have run them together. “Ones with disciplinary reprimands, full of themselves? Or the opposite- pilots who’d expect a promotion?” 

“Not especially either,” the pilot said. “Not officer’s favorites- the transport pilots who we know, among ourselves, are the best? That sort. Retired TIE pilots, the fastest jukers... The pilot whose name was down for Eadu - for Galen and his team, that is- I knew his name, he'd jumped onto the kriffing Kessel Run rather than let pirates take his cargo a while ago, managed not to die, got himself bumped up to flying personnel around…” 

Cassian was very still, absorbing this; Jyn regained herself and leaned forward again.. 

“When,” she said, clearing her throat a little. “When were they taking him away?”

“It would have been... “ Even more properly alert, the pilot surged upright, scrambling to his knees with a movement that made Saw train a weapon on him. “What day is it? What time?”

When Cassian told him, the pilot made a small sound of dismay, said, “The plans, it’s… only the pickups on Danuta and Toprawa left, then - that’s- even Toprawa’s only, only fifty-two hours from now...”

The interception Galen mentioned in his hologram - there was a convoy, collecting all pieces and copies of the plans, with all changes made on site. It was heading to the Imperial Center vaults that a Moff named Tarkin deemed the only adequate security. The pilot had always been good at memorizing astrogation data, pickup times- Galen had managed to show him a copy of the convoy’s schedule, and the pilot knew it cold.

“He had all that in his head,” Cassian murmured darkly at Saw when they left the cell, moving quickly, “and you turned that  _thing_ loose on him?” 

Saw turned the first smile Jyn had seen from him in over a decade on Cassian. 

“Do you think, Captain… that General Draven of Rebel Intelligence would do any less?”

It was the first time Jyn had heard that name - the only General she’s heard of in Intelligence is Chief Cracken - but it shut Cassian’s outrage off, entirely, back to the cold mask she first met.)

“I can’t just - call you Galen’s daughter,” the pilot says, now. “Or Stardust. I mean, ‘Stardust, Galen’s Daughter’- sounds like Wynssa Starflare’s latest character in a bad holo-”   
  
“Jyn,” Cassian calls from around the bend.

“Oh,” the pilot says. He puts out his hand, awkwardly. “That’s you? Jyn? I’m Bodhi Rook.”

She’d heard his name in Jedha City, stored it, but hadn’t pulled the words back out till now. She shakes his hand.   
  
“He didn’t mention my name,” Jyn says to Bodhi. “My father?”   
  
Bodhi lets go of her hand and shakes his head, then must see something in her expression. 

“Don’t go thinking-” he adds hastily, then stops, clearly struggles to fit the right words to it. “It was like Galen was - keeping it to himself. Like it was something… he’d trust me with convoy details, but not your name. Not your mother’s name.”    
  
“He talked about my mother with you?”   


“Not really-” Bodhi starts, awkwardly, and stops when he sees Chirrut and Baze approaching, at a leisurely pace, from the way they’d come. 

“Come to say goodbye?” Jyn says, feeling surprisingly fond of the two men. She quashes the feeling.

“Come to follow onto your ship,” Chirrut answers, “for your path, Jyn, is clear.”

“It’s never been that,” she says, thrown. Baze Malbus looks distinctly less enthused with this turn of events, but he does seem to have his loading cannon back. “And it’s Cassian’s ship, so... good luck.”

“Jyn,” Cassian calls again, appearing around the bend in the catacombs just long enough to beckon.

“We don’t need lu-” Chirrut starts to say, but Baze interrupts.

“With that one,” he says, nodding after Cassian, “Force or not, Chirrut- I think you will need luck.”    
  


* * *

 

Cassian reacts exactly as predicted when the Guardians indicate they’re inclined to come along. Politely grateful, but firm on the ‘no,’ as he stands in the U-wing’s loading doors, K-2 lurking over his shoulder.

“We’ll take you back closer to Jedha City,” Cassian says. “Apologies, but we cannot take you all the way.”

“To Toprawa,” Chirrut says to Cassian. The planet’s name had been said quietly, and away from him, but he’d apparently overheard it. “Home of the Antarian Rangers. You might call them cousins, of the Guardians.”

“Rangers,” Bodhi repeats. “Like in the old stories? Soldiers, who worked for the Jedi - kind of, sidekicks?”

“Fools,” Baze Malbus rumbles, “who were turned down for Jedi training and could not let go. Like others I know. And like the Jedi, extinct.”

“Not quite extinct,” Chirrut says. “Not yet. The Force wants us to go with you, Captain Andor.”

Captain Andor mutters something, either to himself or K-2, about the Force and priorities. He jerks his head, and it’s not clear if he’s agreeing or just ending the conversation, offering the promised ride. Jyn boards and moves after him, into the cockpit, jostling K-2SO on her way and earning her the closest thing she’s ever heard to a heavy sigh from something without lungs.

“We wouldn’t have gotten here without them,” Jyn prompts Cassian, as he takes the pilot’s chair. She leans on the other seat and manages a half-smile. “At least, not this quickly.”

“The Force, is it - I didn’t take you for a believer,” he murmurs, resting his head against the back of his seat even as he adjusts the controls. 

Jyn is a less than mediocre pilot, but she’s stood behind enough pilots with blasters to their heads to recognize the steps Cassian’s taking. It’s not to take the ship out of the atmosphere. 

“The last time an officer put ‘The Force willed it’ in a mission report,” Cassian adds, “he was put on ground crew - permanently. I can’t act on-” His jaw twitches, not with the shadow of a smile this time but seeming to reach for an adequate word. “-  _Whims_.” 

She gives him a less real smile, one that bares her teeth. “What are you planning to act on, then? Not orders - there’s no point left in going after my father.”  

Galen’s words bounce around under her hair, his face before her eyes. The holochip capturing him is in one of Cassian’s pockets. She’s acutely conscious of that- but there’s nothing to do but block off the thought of seeing her father again. He’s out of Cassian’s reach - out of hers-

He’s  _let_ himself be taken to Tarkin’s unknown location, _in the name of buying time_ \- and everything he’s intended, ashes, if they don’t use that time. Fifty-two hours, Bodhi told them- about an hour ago… 

“You’re quick to give that up,” Cassian says, eyes still on the controls, “on nothing but the pilot’s word it’s too late.”

“Give up?” Jyn repeats, instantly infuriated. She doesn’t have anything to give up. “I came because  _what choice_ did I have - not for blasted hope, not because of _your_ word that your orders were to _extract_ him,” she seethes. She wedges herself between his seat and the viewport, just enough to the side so their knees don’t knock, just enough in his way to force him to look at her. “From what I’ve seen I trust your word about as far as I can throw you-” 

Cassian’s glance is very measuring, gauging, as she is in return, exactly how far she could realistically throw him-

“I see I’m interrupting,” K-2SO says from behind them. He maneuvers into the cockpit. “Nothing in my programming inclines me to care. You’re in my way, Jyn.”

She breaks her glare at Cassian first and moves out from between the seats to let K-2’s long metal legs through. She stays in the cockpit, though, hovering behind the seats, as Cassian and K-2 get them in the air. 

Cassian calls back to Chirrut and Baze that he’ll be dropping them off, and Jyn looks back to see their reaction - Chirrut’s head lowers, but he seems to be more meditative than disappointed.  

“A portion of Imperial forces seem to be evacuating Jedha City,” Baze reports, from the U-Wing’s window. 

“You should sit down,” Cassian says sharply to Jyn. She’s holding her balance, with a grip on the back of his chair. “Strap in.” 

“I’ve got a better view of the moon rise from here,” Jyn says, tartly. In between the seats, out the viewport, the outline of the planet NaJedha as well as the system’s setting sun is apparent on the horizon as the moon of Jedha spins toward its nightfall. The other moon is small and star-like in comparison, stark against the near-orange sky.

“Jedha is the only moon of the planet NaJedha,” K-2SO says dismissively. “You are admiring either an orbiting asteroid or satellite.”  

It looks like neither an asteroid or satellite and her stomach lurches, for no real reason, a touch of Saw’s paranoia following her. 

“Which?” she says.

“The ship’s scanners can’t determine from here-”

Cassian, who’s been eyeing the surface for a spot to re-land the ship, is looking up now, too. 

Though small, the perfect roundness of the little moon is striking, a hole in the sky.

“K, whatever travel guide you downloaded must be off,” he says, his accent a touch rougher than usual. “That’s-”

Jyn, ignoring the rest of his sentence, turns and steps back into the ship’s main hold. “How many moons does NaJedha have?” 

Chirrut’s head lifts.

Bodhi, confused, holds up one finger as Baze says drily, “ _Your_ eyes work, don’t they?” 

It’s not visible, from his side window, not visible at all except for anyone crowded into the cockpit.

“Captain,” Chirrut calls forward, getting to his feet. “Don’t land the ship.”

Jyn wheels back around, sliding into the space between the two seats. 

“I didn’t exactly count the moons on the way into the system,” Cassian is saying testily to K-2; he glances left at Jyn and says, “I heard him.” The ship is, in fact, already rising rather than lowering. 

“What’s going on?” Bodhi says, crowding up behind Jyn. A beat later, over her shoulder, he says, “That shouldn’t be there.”

Cassian orders them to strap in, his voice a knife this time as he tells them they’re going to lightspeed in a hurry. Bodhi scrambles to do so, though moving backwards, his eyes still on the front viewport, going for the closest strap to grab. Baze has a view now, and seems to be quietly filling Chirrut in, out the side of his mouth. 

“You haven’t specified calculations to where,” K-2 is complaining, and Cassian says, “Base One.” 

There’s a bar on the back of both pilot’s seats, a standard safety aid in the one step up to the cockpit. Jyn winds her hands around the seat’s bar, braces her feet against the step and her shoulder against the ship’s side, and stubbornly stays put.

They rise above Jedha, the face of a fallen Jedi statue on its surface fading to just a small, shapeless rock, and the city itself to just one bright dot on a sandy moon. They break atmosphere, and Jyn gets one good look at the other, little moon - a distant gray shape against the stars, half in shadow and something like a shadow itself. There’s a dent, like a perfect crater, on its surface. And the whole thing is moving, nearing Jedha, entering the larger moon’s orbit. 

Jyn sucks in a breath, and the ship’s air, still cold from Jedha,  _hurts_ , chills its way down her throat and lungs. 

“Punch it,” Cassian says to K-2, his voice again as harsh as she’s heard it. Jyn’s jarred by the jump, her shoulder slamming a little, her knuckles white on the seat’s bar. 

The moving moon is gone, lost in the lines of lightspeed.

* * *

 

Cassian’s the first to move. He checks a readout in front of him and gets up from his seat the second he’s confirmed they’re secure in hyperspace and K-2 has their course under control. Jyn pries her fingers off the bar before Cassian passes her, before he can see how tight she’s holding on.

“That was it,” Jyn says, surprised by how hollow her voice sounds.

“That,” K-2SO says, “was approximately thirty percent larger than any sustainable space station to date, aside from the permanently-fixed Centerpoint-”

“We don’t know what that was,” Cassian says, his eyes on Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze. 

“ _We_ don’t know what that was,” Baze repeats, with an entirely different emphasis. “Why, Captain, does it seem like _you_ do?” 

Cassian’s glance runs over him, then turns to the pilot. “Bodhi-”

“I don’t know what it looks like,” Bodhi says, shaking his head. “I imagined something - jagged. Pointed. Galen said they call it the Death Star, and \- Captain, that’s my home, that’s Jedha, there’s nothing on Jedha but the crystals, and-” Bodhi glances at the Guardians and gestures, his hand shaking, “and them, and the crystals are gone, there’s nothing but _sand_ , what would they want with Jedha-”

“You,” Baze says, and Bodhi falls silent, his mouth still parted. Jyn saw a man shot, once, who reacted with the same expression. 

“Bodhi, this is very important,” Cassian says, urgently, ignoring the fear and mystery hovering over them all. No, cutting through it. “Does the Empire know what you have? That you have the convoy schedule?”

Bodhi’s mouth parts, farther, and with effort he brings himself into the moment, and answers, his head dipped, “Only if they got it out of Galen.” He glances over at Jyn, seems to swallow the implicit  _if they made him talk, if they found him out._ "They’d know - I had the station’s name, I was supposed to be making a delivery to _it_. They’d know I knew Horuz, and Eadu, and Jedha- “ 

“Okay,” Cassian says, very gently, and then moves very swiftly to the side of the ship, picking up a headset and beginning some kind of transmission.

Jyn, without quite meaning to, and still with a wary distance, has drifted closer to Bodhi. His hands are covering his mouth, his eyes very wide.

“We need to send some kind of warning,” Bodhi says. “If that’s - if that was the Death Star we need to send word, something, anything, back, is that what the Captain’s…?”

“No,” Jyn says, more bluntly than she means to. There’s a little girl in the back of her head shouting about Saw, and she pushes her down - Saw’s people aren’t blind, Saw saw the same message they did, if there’s any chance of evacuation, Saw will take it. They could be wrong-

There might be strange coincidences at work in the universe, but a moving moon showing up where there’s leaked information about a secret planet killer does not seem likely to be one of them.

Bodhi’s mouth works, silently, again, and he says, “Saw Gererra’s not going to Toprawa.”

“No,” she says, again.

“We are, though?” Bodhi says, a little desperately. “Galen - he said…”

Jyn glances behind her at Cassian, all his concentration on whatever code he’s sending, and turns back to Bodhi, knowing she’s not speaking for Cassian or the Alliance or anyone but herself and the man her father sent when she says, “We are.”

Over her shoulder, Chirrut, although blind, seems to be meeting her eyes and gives her one quick nod.

“You think that moon was a weapon,” Baze says slowly, having been following the conversation like a game of grav-ball, his eyes following bounces. “A weapon, heading for our home. And we left.”

Bodhi backs up and sinks down against the wall.

“What would you have had us do?” Chirrut says, his voice both wry and pained, and Baze abruptly paces away, though there’s nowhere to go, paces to the rear of the ship and sets himself against its back wall there, a slumped sentinel. 

Cassian, near the front, seems to be listening to a message back, one that tightens the lines on his face. 

Jyn waits and approaches as soon as he’s put away the headset, before he can step back into the cockpit. “Base One,” she says, looking up at him, moving into his space both to talk quietly and to get in his face. She’s heard of Base One- Reekeene sent and received messages from Alliance headquarters, though didn’t know its location. The chance of capture for Irregular units is deemed too high. “Tell me it’s not on the other end of the galaxy from Toprawa.”

“It’s not,” Cassian says, and she steps when he steps to prevent him moving around her. She’s not sure what she’ll do, if he really is taking them too far out of range to steal the plans her father, Bodhi, sacrificed for… though part of her mind is clocking every option, where his blaster sits on his hips, a shot angle to take out the droid in the cockpit, wild thoughts she knows she can’t follow and would prefer not to think. They’re there, nonetheless.

The little gray moon, coming closer, is the image she can’t get out from behind her eyelids. It’s interwoven with her father’s face. She doesn’t know what they’ve left behind, on Jedha. She can imagine plenty.

“Are you sure about that?” There’s a challenge, in her voice, she can’t help, and Cassian’s face is hard when he looks down at her.

“Doesn’t trust go both ways?”

“I know what your orders were, and I’m not sure if you’re still trying to follow them,” she says. “And I don’t mean an  _extraction_.” 

His eyes, dark and unreadable, give no reaction, no flicker of guilt, away. There’s no confusion, either. She doesn’t have to lay out the question of eliminate or extract

“You’re a fool, if you’re not going to follow what we’ve been given, what  _my father_ gave us,” she says, “and it was wrong, in the first place, when I’m on your side-” 

“I’ve read your file, _wrote_ half of it,” Cassian says, so very quietly she almost misses the rage, “and you think yourself a moral authority, upon, what? Two months in an outlying unit, a promotion you bargained for, instead of bled for? What do you know about my side?”

“I think I’ve been a rebel,” she says, “even when without the luxury of political opinions-”

“‘Luxury?’” She thinks for a second he’s going to grab and shake her, shifts her stance to prepare. He leans closer instead, his voice lower and more dangerous. “We don’t all have the luxury of deciding when and where we want to care about something, and I’m still not convinced-”

“What? That I do care?” she says, as cuttingly as she can. “Me, either. But I’m still standing here, aren’t I?”

Not running, and maybe not just because there’s nowhere to run.

Cassian’s eyes rake over her own, and she can’t read him worth a damn.

“We’re on course for Yavin 4,” he says abruptly. “Alliance headquarters. It’s not far from Toprawa. Not even out of the way.”

“They’ll send the Rebel fleet,” she says, with a rush of relief that convinces her she cares more than anything that’s come before, “intercept the convoy. The plans.”

Cassian steps back from her - and is still not even a full step away. They’d gotten more into one another’s space than she realized.

He says, in a tone as unreadable as his eyes, “You’ve yet to properly meet the ‘talk first’ part of the Rebellion.”  


 


	6. would you follow me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The "talk first" part of the Rebellion.

Cassian’s in something like trouble. Jyn realizes that the second she sees the expression of a man with rust-colored hair, who meets their ship on Yavin 4’s landing platform- his face is carefully blank, a sabacc mask even more effective than Cassian’s own. Or maybe it’s only the long hours in the captain’s constant company giving her a better read on him. There’s new tension in Cassian’s shoulders- she hadn’t thought it was possible for that to increase further still - as he squares them and readies to get off the ship, looks over the motley crew he’s towing in with him.

Baze describes the temples and surrounding greenery of Yavin 4 to Chirrut as they disembark and describes, too, the face of Cassian’s general as they approach him.

“There’s a darkness here,” Chirrut says, frowning and turning his head, equally in search of something as the others look around. “Light, too. But a darkness behind it.”

“Is it him?” Bodhi whispers, nodding at the man they’re walking toward.

“He’s a fair-faced man,” Baze says, of the general, “with something of the terrible, about his mouth and eyes. I don’t think he’s your darkness, Chirrut.”

“He might be Captain Andor’s, though,” Chirrut murmurs, and Captain Andor chooses to ignore this.

“Stay back,” he warns both the Guardians, and doesn’t have to warn Bodhi, who’s busy staring up at Yavin’s sky.

Jyn, who gets a nod from Cassian instead, follows him, step-in-step with K-2SO’s long mechanical legs.

“General Draven,” Cassian says, with a nod that bends his shoulders, making Jyn think of a bow. “Sergeant Erso, of Reekeene’s Roughnecks.”

She doesn’t give General Draven any nod but stares at him square on, shifting her weight to more of a smuggler’s stance than a soldier’s, hip with her blaster a little higher than the other.

“Next you’ll be telling me,” Draven says, his eyes flicking between Cassian and the crowd behind them,  “the blind fellow with the stick is a bomber from the starfighter corps and the one in the armor is for the aquatic navy. What other validation could you, after all, possibly have for bringing them here." It's not a question, and then his attention shifts to her. "Erso. Reekeene made you a sergeant?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Jyn says, so drolly that Cassian shoots her a look that begs her to behave.

“I have urgent news,” Cassian says, “sir, from the pilot, including a hologram message, that needs to be put before the Council, without delay. And I need the transmissions team intercepting any word coming out of the Jedha system.” He hesitates. “It’s possible we have visual, as well as verbal, confirmation of the superweapon.”

“As witnessed by-”

“Me,” Cassian says simply, and Draven pauses, his face still blank but momentarily frozen in a way that gives his fear away. It’s gone, a blink later, but it makes the man briefly human.

“Very well, then,” Draven says, and snags a passing pilot - physically, just grabs the nearest one, a man in flightsuit pants but an out-of-uniform shirt, by his sleeve.

“General,” the pilot protests, his face’s heavy laugh lines moving out of shape in distress, “I’m on my way to sickbay-”

“You’re to escort the sergeant to the mess hall,” Draven says, nodding at Jyn. “And…” He looks over at Bodhi, Baze, and Chirrut. “Her friends. Andor, have them disarm. Bring the pilot - no, not you, Janson,” he says, as the stranger points to himself confusedly.

Jyn finds herself left with the bewildered pilot and the Guardians, as Cassian puts a word in Baze’s ear about leaving the repeating cannon on the U-wing and then signaling Bodhi to follow him.

“You’re the sergeant?” Janson says, looking her up and down.

Captain Andor, meanwhile, is walking away with his hands behind his back, K-2SO escorting Bodhi behind him.

To the sky, Janson says, “This is terrible. I’ve been given the best assignment of my whole year, and I’m probably contagious.”

Jyn takes a hasty two steps further away.

“This one,” Baze says to Chirrut, “has the face of a clown.”

Janson objects to this, on the grounds that his face is currently red and temperature elevated, and spends the walk to Yavin’s mess hall trying to describe to Chirrut what he actually looks like.

“Handsome,” Janson repeats, gesturing to himself, an exaggeration if not quite a lie. Jyn’s definition of the word inclines more toward…. she kills that thought very dead.

Chirrut, for some reason, doesn’t seem as amused by this chatter as Jyn would have expected. He’s troubled, and reluctant to eat, until Baze positively insists.

Cassian comes and finds them while they’re still at the dining table.

“Where’s Bodhi?” Jyn asks immediately, as Baze asks, “What news of Jedha?”

Cassian’s quick to reassure Jyn that Bodhi’s being looked over in medbay, and confirms, as well, there is no news yet of Jedha. A few encrypted messages possibly from Saw’s Partisans, which are currently being broken.

“You can go see Bodhi,” Cassian says, a heavy tone in his voice that suggests he senses her suspicion, “but Mon Mothma’s requested to speak with you first.”

Jyn drops her fork. She recovers quickly, clambering to her feet

He pulls something out of his jacket pocket - a patch with one pip, a smaller dot than any of those of the badge Cassian has pinned to his jacket since their arrival on Yavin. A sergeant’s badge.

He needs her to be taken seriously.

“Alliance High Command isn’t all on base,” he says, handing the badge to her. “They can’t gather the Council within the timeline Bodhi’s given us.”

“What does that mean?” Jyn says sharply. She struggles to pin the badge to her jacket with her attention elsewhere. “The message is clear - we’ve got one real chance to intercept the plans- and don’t tell me I’m not going to be part of it.”

“I’m telling you,” Cassian says, “without full Council approval, there may not be anything to be a part of.”

He reaches out and adjusts her badge.

“Waiting for permission?” Baze says. “What sort of a rebellion is this?”

He’s spoken Jyn’s mind.

 

* * *

 

Jyn tries not to flinch, when Mon Mothma walks into the council room, all in flowing white - for a second she sees the man in white her mother died killing, the sweep of his cape as he fell.

It’s just her, in the room with those of Alliance High Command presently on planet. Cassian said he had something else to do.

They ask her questions - Draven, mostly. Some of them were answered in her father’s hologram, which they’ve seen - she points out she knows no more than them, points out they’re wasting time, already -

Bodhi’s statements are being ‘taken under review’, with a medical examination to ensure his mind remains sound after days in Saw’s care.

“The Alliance firmly holds that torture is not a reliable source of information,” Mon Mothma says.

“Well-” Draven seems to think better of his interruption. “That is Council policy.”

“And so you’re implying the _tortured_ are automatically unreliable?” Jyn says, truly furious.

“You expect us to risk everything on a message no longer than a minute from an Imperial scientist and a defector’s rambling?” another man, one she doesn’t know by name, asks her, and she counters, _what reason would he have to lie_ , about both men, points out that the power of a battle station named the _Death Star_ could condemn the galaxy to submission-

“ _ If _ operational-”  

  
Jyn almost laughs. “There was a moon-sized object moving toward Jedha, that doesn’t sound  _ operational  _ to you?” 

There’s a hesitation, a look exchanged between Draven and Mon Mothma. Draven looks perturbed, in a way he didn’t upon their arrival.

“Since you departed Jedha, there’s been a mining accident,” Mon Mothma says, in a voice that sounds like it has never been anything but clear and gentle. There’s strength in it, nonetheless, when she adds, “The Empire is _reporting_ it as a mining accident. The message from the handful of Partisans that escaped their base’s destruction imply otherwise.”

Jyn had not looked back, when she walked away from Saw this time.

“Saw Gerrera?” she asks. “Is he-”

“Wiped off the map, but it’s worse than that,” General Draven interrupts, moving briskly on. “The whole damn city’s lost. It is highly possible this is your father’s work made operational, but we have nothing but speculation -  certainly, probable speculation- but since it was the city, not the moon itself, we have no proof and even if-” he breaks off, seemingly frustrated and disgusted beyond further words, nothing of the mask about his contorted face now. Jyn isn’t sure which side of this debate he’s on.

Jyn can’t process the reality - the city where she walked, through its marketplace, through Saw’s catacombs, only hours ago as real and as ancient as the temple walls surrounding her - _Saw_ , asking her to save the dream _\- wiped off the map-_

“The Empire blows up a city-” how many beings, in Jedha City, in its crowded streets, how many children had she passed and eyed to make sure they weren’t pickpocketing her, “and you don’t take the chance my father spent his life giving you? Your answer is to do nothing?”

She’s on her feet, in the near-empty council room, before she’s conscious of jumping up.

“We’ve summoned the full Council,” Mon Mothma says. “By tomorrow-”

“Tomorrow?” Jyn says, horrified. Bodhi had traced out the bare bones he knew on their way to the base - Danuta didn’t have a full set of the plans; Toprawa did; the convoy was making hard-copy pickups, not trusted to transmission, and delivering them to Imperial Center. It had seemed like the Force working, that Toprawa was the chance they had left, that they had time to get there. Their window of opportunity, though, was already sliding shut, with every moment of deliberation.

“Tomorrow,” Mon Mothma says firmly. “To take action with full support of this Council, without the full civilian body of this Council-” She doesn’t cast a look at General Draven, but a mustached man in a blue flightsuit does, indicating that comment has a certain direction, “would risk breaking apart this Alliance. The Toprawa system, in particular - restricted since Empire Day, where actions of resistance have been met with swift and harsh reprisal. A mass military action in that system, however critical, would be bound to be devastating to not only Alliance forces but the civilian populace.”

“What if it wasn’t a mass action?” Jyn says, seizing on it. “A hit-and-run unit could get in, get-”

“Getting out,” a white-bearded general interrupts, “is the concern. Assembling an exit strategy for a restricted system is the work of many months- no extraction nor contact with resources in system has been possible since a third battlewagon was added to the Imperial presence there, some time ago.” His voice and manner are gentle, grandfatherly; behind it, Jyn sees something of Saw and his suspicion of traps. “However tempting the gambit- we cannot allow Imperial information, honestly relayed or not, to dictate our commitment of resources.”

“That’s a long-winded way of calling it a suicide run,” the man in the blue flightsuit says. He says the words lightly, with the air of a starfighter who’s survived a few such runs in his time and confident he could do so again.

“Yes,” the white-bearded general agrees, simply, a surety in his voice.  

A man in a cape, the only one besides Mothma here in non-military garb, bends forward, into the table’s light. He’s goateed, about her father’s age - and Jyn’s barely finished the comparative thought when he’s saying the words, “My daughter-” which make her fists, clenched at her side, go slack in surprise.

“-has been making runs in a restricted system,” he says. “Delivering relief supplies to Ralltiir. Not all roads in and out are necessarily those of destruction.”

“But the most likely road, Viceroy, could visit on Toprawa the current subjugation of Ralltiir - triggered by General Draven’s unsanctioned initiatives there, let us not forget-”

“I maintain, again,” General Draven says, voice raised, with a dead-eyed glare at the new speaker, “that not all Intelligence objectives can be discussed in committee-”

“What would be left of the Republic, then-” It’s another white-haired man, speaking.

“The Republic’s ashes,” Jyn says, and has their attention again. “It was ashes by the time I was _born_ . Avoid it, deny it, you know it’s true all the same. Do nothing now- and there’s nothing but ashes tomorrow, too. _This_ is the time to fight.”

She swallows. “What’s hope, if you don’t do anything to build on it?” she says, thinking of Cassian’s words to her in Jedha. “What’s a Rebellion, if you don’t rebel?”

There’s a moment of silence, and then Mon Mothma shifts and says, serenely, “I’ve hired a mercenary near Danuta.”

Jyn startles, and even Draven’s staring at Mon Mothma.

“By the time the Council is gathered,” Mon Mothma says, apparently avoiding saying _tomorrow_ , “if we have confirmation that a convoy seems to be collecting plans in that system…” She trails off.

“It’ll be too late,” Jyn says bitterly.

“I’m sorry,” Mon Mothma says, very finally. “We cannot act without full Council approval. Too much is at stake to do any less.”

Jyn’s about to retort when the man with the cape speaks first.

“Exactly,” he says. There’s an odd amount of good humor in his voice, in his eyes as he looks at Jyn. “Too much is at stake to do any less.”

Jyn closes her mouth and agrees, limply, when Mon Mothma asks if Sergeant Erso would consider speaking before the full body of the Council, once assembled.

Jyn’s not sure if the Council member is actually giving Jyn tacit encouragement to take action without approval or if she’s just seeing what she wants to, from a man about her father’s age, with a daughter likely about her own.

Either way, her mind’s made up.

* * *

 

Mon Mothma herself escorts Jyn out of the council room, in order to go, herself, to tell Bodhi, and Chirrut, and Baze, what has become of Jedha City.

Mothma seems to have a lot of practice, delivering bad news with both empathy and poise, remaining very calm while her eyes glisten, very sincerely. If Jyn wasn’t so busy resenting the other woman’s decision, she’d find her very admirable, enviable, in this.

Chirrut says, “Ah,” and Baze refuses, outright, to believe it, for several minutes of pacing, in circles around Chirrut, who sits very still and grim and not entirely surprised.

Bodhi takes it in a state of shock, first silent, then, “It was the Death Star, then,” in an emotionless tone that echoes with _because of me_.

Jyn doesn’t know how to comfort them- doesn’t know what to do, except fight.

Reekeene’s Roughnecks might come, if she could call them. But she doesn’t have the codes to connect with them, and even if she did, by the time the comm bounced through five satellites to the mobile base’s current secret coordinates, it would be too late for any intercept at Toprawa.

She’d found herself with them because she wanted to end one day without running. She’s not sure if this is running or not - it’s certainly running _at_ something - but it feels entirely different.

She slips out of the room - Chirrut notices; she can tell by the lift of his head, but Baze and Bodhi and Mon Mothma and the eavesdroppers in sickbay beds, don’t.

She asks droids for directions - all of them seem to know exactly who K-2SO is, and though she doesn’t speak binary, some of the astromechs’ squeaks seem a little rude at that name - until she finds Cassian Andor.

He’s in an empty room off command, K-2 plugged into a console, charging, or something.

“I heard,” he says, simply, of Jedha.

She hits the switch to close the door behind and turns back to him abruptly.

“We need to steal a ship.”

He gives her a sidelong look.

“I’m stealing a ship to steal the plans on Toprawa,” she corrects, “though you can come along.”

“What made you decide to tell me?” Cassian asks. He turns toward her, arms still crossed.

Jyn blinks at him. She hadn’t thought enough about it to call it a decision.

“Instinct,” she says warily. She tends to trust her instincts, though they’ve lead her into danger as often as out. “And something like this - seems like it should have an actual Rebel spy along. You’re the only one I know, around here.”

“Bodhi’s given K-2 every cargo comm channel he had,” Cassian says absently, dropping his arms and letting his hands fall behind his back. “I’d requested them, in Bodhi’s debrief. The Imperials can’t change them all over one defector- too many landing records, reroutings, delay warnings that need to get through. Most of the encryptions are as old as K-”

“I heard that,” K-2SO says, his eyes lighting up, “and resent the insinuation I’m out of date. My circuits improve with age like a fine Maridun oil.”

“You’re already finding a ship to steal,” she says, a little wonderingly. “An Imperial one.”

He gives her the shadow of a nod, and she narrows her eyes.

“General Draven issuing secret orders?” she asks.

“No,” he says, so ruefully she thinks she believes him. He has, anyway, no reason to lie. “My only order, until tomorrow, is to keep you out of trouble, and I don’t believe I’ll be fulfilling that.”

Cassian hesitates, as he stumbles over his next words. "If we do nothing, then that is what it all would be, everything we’ve done for the Rebellion - everything I’ve done. For nothing.”

He looks lost, at just the thought. And she does believe him. 

“So you’re following yourself, this time.”

“I’m following you,” he says, and before she can protest that she hadn’t even found him yet when he started, he adds. “I heard you promise Bodhi, that _we_ ’d go to Toprawa. As you said - I am a spy.”

Cassian glances at the screen above K-2 - it’s a data list, she realizes, cargo ship times and arrivals in spaceports as K-2’s receiving them- and then he bends toward her.

“Can’t say I’ve ever been a pirate,” he says, lowering his voice a little.

“ _She_ has,” K-2SO says, which Cassian had managed to convey via glance with considerably less disapproval.

“Sound reasoning for me to take lead on this,” Jyn says. She very nearly smiles.

“That is not,” K-2 says, “what I meant to imply-”

“Pick your ship,” Cassian says, stepping around her. He dips his head again, so when she looks over her shoulder, their eyes are level. “And we’ll take it, and our chances.”

He lifts his head and adds, “K, do whatever she tells you -”

“Cassian!” K-2 complains, his distressed movement constrained by his plugged-in arm.

Cassian shrugs, and walks away. He looks back, Jyn notices, though likely just to make sure she and K-2SO aren’t killing each other.

By the time he returns, they have ten more men coming with them and the comm codes for the Rebel cell on Toprawa. She’s got Bodhi, Chirrut, Baze, and a ship picked out to steal.

* * *

What they don’t have is clearance to leave the base. Bodhi, manning the cockpit of the U-wing while the others grab more last-second supplies, is alone when asked for their call sign.

“It’s, um… Rogue,” Bodhi says, then blanks. He looks around wildly, but there’s nothing, no one to prompt him. He pictures Galen, the first time they spoke secretly, putting one finger to his lips until they could disable the bugs. Listening - that had been Bodhi’s first small act of rebellion. Maybe the first thing he’d done right.

He breathes, breathes again, and, as the others close the side door in time to just barely hear him, says, “Rogue One.”  


End file.
